Even Mandela himself does not pretend he controlled who was released when, or that he had any idea when De Klerk was releasing whom.

In fact no-one did – not even his De Klerk’s party.

Plus when it suits him Mandela is ” a leader who has to make decisions ahead of his people” and other times his decisions are decisions of ” a collective”.

Tutu does exactly the same, except when he goes against the mandate of the church it is God who tells him to do so.

And don’t blame whites or apartheid – this is EXACTLY the same pattern that Ghana followed – they were bankrupt in less than a decade and their first president deposed by a coup.

It started with the ANC borrowing to do the Arms Deal and having to follow the rules set by the World Bank and the IMF (who also insisted on the sale of Sasol and all parastatals. Unfortunately they could only find buyers for the profitable ones – Sasol, Iscor, Telkom etc )

They made PROFITS for the state in 1994. Not only are the good ones sold, but we are borrowing R400 billion to fix the bad ones that no-one wanted to buy (SAA, SABC, Eskom)

Compare the balance sheet of 1994 and our last National budget and INCLUDE those borrowings, and you will see we are bankrupted.

And who is rich from those sales?

AND we have lost 5 million jobs since 1994, NOT just 1 million last year – and we have NO industrial policy to create jobs, even now.

But what happened next. The human and physical capital inherited by the ANC government was, and continues to be, squandered, bit by bit. By selling assets, corruption, mismanagement and no management. It wasn’t the Codesa agreement that was flawed, it was its implementation, largely by an inept and corrupt ANC government. Race doesn’t even come into it except as a convenient distraction.

Go read all the publications of that time; the ANC/SACP Unions and everyone associated with bringing down Apartheid, anyone pressing for economic considerations was lucky not to be necklaced.

Now it is 16 years too late and needs patient, dedicated, hard work plus huge huge resources to be ploughed into Black/disadvantaged education and skills training for at least the next 10 years.

The ANC/SACP/Union allaince leading us should be strongly punished for not starting this way back in 1994.

Brent

Mandela is a man, not an icon. He espoused violence at one time and that landed him in gaol for most of his life. He admits his mistakes openly in his autobiography. I’m sure he had great difficulty making peace with FW but Mandela saw that anything else could lead only to the total destruction of the country and millions of deaths.

What would be left for ‘the people’ to ‘inherit’ after all out civil war? Nothing. The existing infra-structure would be destroyed. The country would have no functioning economy for decades, if ever. A civil war could only worsen the future for the people Mandela loved and tried to save from utter ruin.

Mandela had nothing personal to gain from what he did. He wasn’t ‘playing hero’. He went out of his way to emphasise everywhere he went in the world that it was the ‘collective’ of the ANC that had liberated the country. If Mandela did anything wrong it was that: bowing unconditionally to the ‘collective’. The ‘collective’ is a convenient way to avoid responsibility and keep people in a state of fear. No matter how stupid the decisions of the collective, one cannot differ. That is how the Soviet Empire destroyed itself from within–with Winnie-type ‘purges’ of those who dared to differ.

Mandela is not perfect but he is the best the ANC has produced and that is good enough in my book.

Maybe not too much of a point, given who she is, but much more than you admit. And she’s dead right about Archappeaser Tutu, too.